Terror to the Wicked: America's First Trial by Jury That Ended a War and Helped to Form a Nation

Terror to the Wicked: America's First Trial by Jury That Ended a War and Helped to Form a Nation

By Tobey Pearl

Released March 16, 2021

The year: 1638. The setting: Providence, near Plymouth Colony. A young Nipmuc tribesman returning home from trading beaver pelts is fatally stabbed in a robbery in the woods near Plymouth Colony by a vicious white runaway indentured servant. The tribesman, fighting for his life, is able with his final breaths to reveal the details of the attack to Providence’s governor, Roger Williams. A frantic manhunt by the fledgling government ensues to capture the killer and his gang, now the most hunted men in the New World. With their capture, the two-year-old Plymouth Colony faces overnight its first trial—a murder trial—with Plymouth’s governor presiding as judge and prosecutor,interviewing witnesses and defendants alike, and Myles Standish, Plymouth Colony authority, as overseer of the courtroom, his sidearm at the ready. The jury—Plymouth colonists, New England farmers (“a rude and ignorant sorte,” as described by former governor William Bradford)—white, male, picked from a total population of five hundred and fifty, knows from past persecutions the horrors of a society without a jury system. Would they be tempted to protect their own—including a cold-blooded murderer who was also a Pequot War veteran—over the life of a tribesman who had fought in a war allied against them?

Tobey Pearl earned degrees in law and international relations from Boston University and studied international law at the University of Hong Kong. She practiced law and taught at Emerson College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.